Nazi Literature in the Americas

Nazi Literature in the America's is a fascinating pseudo-dictionary covering over a half century of fictional Latin American fascist writers. While the title suggests the book focuses on Nazis, the authors and poets discussed are more generally fascists and madmen (or madwomen as the case sometimes is) that strict Nazi's. The book itself is a fascinating look into the world of Roberto Bolano, and is self-referencing and at times very funny. While the articles themselves vary, most are only a few pages long. All in all, Nazi Literature is a strange and interesting book on (fictional) extremist literature and Bolano's sly portrayal of what literature as a whole might mean.

Bolano's book provides a literary pastiche of dotty Nazi scribes in the Americas but primarily South America and it's to Bolano's credit that he fleshes out these fictional writers with credibility though I thought in a rather gentle (or should that be subtle?) way. The thirty-one writers have their lives and personalities revealed according to the (fictional) information available, some get a page or two others several. Three of my favourites are Harry Sibelius who wrote 'The True Son of Job', 1,333 pages darkly mirroring Arnold J. Toynbee's 'Hitler's Europe'. Argentino 'Fatso' Schiaffino, the only writer to mix national socialism and football and get away with it and Thomas R Murchison, a scam artist and all-round opportunist who started the first literary magazine devoted to the Aryan Brotherhood though he always referred to them as 'an order for knights of misfortune'. The last chapter: Epilogue for Monsters on secondary figures, publishing houses, magazines and books is where Bolano really excels. Bolano wrote the book in 1998 and since his death in 2003 the title has grown in stature like the rest of his books. Literary satire seems a difficult genre to work well, a title I've always enjoyed is The Pooh Perplex : A Freshman Casebook by Frederick Crews from decades ago but with 'Nazi Literature in the Americas' Roberto Bolano has succeeded admirably.

When I approach a satirical work I follow a simple rubric: does it make me laugh. The honest belly laugh is, for me, the "scathe" in scathing satire. There is not a single chapter in Roberto Bolano's "Nazi Literature in America" that failed to elicit howls of laughter sometimes accompanied by tears. Bolano presents the reader with a compendium of fictional biographies of non-existent writers. With each entry one gets the impression that he has taken Hannah Arendt's "the banality of evil" seriously. Each author is presented in an uncritical and dead-pan manner which forces the reader to ferret out the "evil" in the context of his/her "banal" biographical narrative. Not a single "author" in "Nazi Literature" approaches anything like genius. Even those who live rather colorful lives write in rather turgid prose and aimless fiction that produces a sort of stupor in their readership. This, I think is the key to understanding what Bolano is really up to. He may have had Goya's famous etching in mind:"El sueno de la razon produce monstruos" (the sleep of reason brings forth monsters).

Is it science fiction? Although "Nazi Literature In The Americas" was first published in Spanish in 1996, some of his fictional Nazi sympathizers live until years like 2016. This is one of the reader's first clues that something really strange is going on here. This book is structured like a small encyclopedia, with each entry describing an imaginary poet, novelist, or journalist who supposedly supported extremist politics. They come from both North and South America. The Latin American fascists seem quite authentic, and it is impressive that Bolano gets right most of his USA references for his Yankee writers. The author's method is to mingle historical fact and wild speculation to create a portrait and criticism of 20th century literature that is both outrageous and weirdly convincing. His method can be clearly seen in the brief entry in the "Epilogue For Monsters" for the fictional character Otto Haushofer: "1871--Berlin, 1945. Nazi Philosopher. Godfather of Luz Mendiluce and father of various harebrained theories: hollow earth, solid universe, original civilizations, the interplanetary Aryan tribe. He committed suicide after being raped by three drunk Uzbek soldiers." There was, in fact, a family of German philosophers named Haushofer who supported the Nazis (and paid dearly for it.) But Bolano's fictional twist is shockingly funny and suddenly chilling. It's the tone he maintains throughout this short book. He plays it with an utterly straight face but at times you can see Bolano struggling not to burst out in dark laughter. At one point he mentions in passing the science fiction writer Norman Spinrad, and it's like a wink at the reader. Spinrad wrote a great science-fiction novel titled The Iron Dream in which he postulates an alternate universe where Adolf Hitler was an acclaimed Golden Age sci-fi writer instead of the scourge of the 20th century. And what Bolano does here is quite as audacious: he gives his Nazis souls, and makes them human instead of mere caricatures. Indeed, many of them are artists; which makes them all the more more appalling. Some of the "stories" (if you want to call them that) are perhaps too short and elliptical to have as much impact as you would like. But others hit the bullseye very squarely. My appetite is now whetted for Bolano's big books: The Savage Detectives: A Novel and his supposed masterpiece 2666: A Novel, which is scheduled for publication in English this year.

To preface: As we all know, Roberto Bolano passed away in 2003. Like many in America, New Directions let us in on the secret with "By Night In Chile" and "Distant Star" (which is actually an elaboration of the final story in "Nazi Literature in the Americas"). Next came "Last Evenings on Earth" and "Amulet" last year. "The Savage Detectives" came out via Farrar, Straus and Giroux last year as well and, his masterpiece, "2666" is on its way. If you haven't read any of these, it doesn't matter what order, just read any and all. "Nazi Literature in the Americas" reads like a history (but not in a bad way). Bolano creates dozens of personalities, each with intricite details and interesting character traits that even a third-party (Bolano) can convey gently. Each character exists throughout North and South America in the twentieth-century, some not dying until 2040 (which Bolano uses to hint that these people still exist into the later twenty-first century). As the title suggests, each character is tied, in Bolano fashion, to fascist literary movements in their respective time period and country. Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce, the first chronicled in the novel, is a bourgeois Argentine who met Hitler in the 1930's and was sympathetic to the cause ever since. Max Mirebalais, is a poor Haitian who steals from other European poets and crafts "many masks," which he uses to create an ideology of hate. Argentino Schiaffino is a thug from Buenos Aires who loves soccer and violence and believes in the heirarchy of races and is on the run most of his life for murder. One gets the point. The problem is, this doesn't half convey the textual density and complexity of the work. The way the characters interact within each others stories, how one influences the other, etc. The depth that Bolano went through to create this world is astonishing (as his epilogue with a glossary of names, places, publishers, books, and miniture biographies of minor characters in the stories). The beauty, in the end, is that each is not a celebrate of Hitler or Aryan supremacy. Most are misguided and some are playing games even with themselves. The real world is ever present in Bolanos world and the presence of these characters moving, most of the time at odds with the real world, is fascinating. The trick is that each characters intolerance is shown in different ways - not directed at Hitler or other fascist leaders, but in the culture of fascism that still exists today - even as it did in 1996 when this novel was published. I cannot recommend this more highly. I was anticipating it greatly and I was not let down. The only problem for avid readers of Bolano, is the final chapter, "The Infamous Ramirez Hoffman" is the shortened version of his previous novel "Distant Star," which he does allude to at the beginning of that work. But taken separately, the shortened version does leave much to be desired - which one fulfills with "Distant Star." It is also different because, while famou